


Mad King Thorin

by orphan_account



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Dain is a good king, Gen, Mourning, Post-Canon, Thorin defense squad, You do not insult Thorin in presence of his company, or there will be consequences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2042625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some dwarves of the company got into a fight in Dale.<br/>Dain is not terribly happy at them, until he learns of the reason for that fight</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> THORIN DEFENSE SQUAD IN ACTION  
> that means his company, and me too  
> because with the release of the new trailer, I am getting VERY upset with all these posts about gold sickness and Thorin being greedy and mad uwu

Dain looked down at Ori, and the boy looked back at him, standing straight and proud between Dwalin and Gloin. He was a tiny little thing of a dwarf, and the king had sometimes wondered how that child had surived the quest for Erebor. Seeing him then, with his black eye and split lip and the way he looked ready to bite anyone who might say a single wrong word, Dain understood better.

It did not mean he approved in any way.

"You have been fighting with humans in Dale," the king accused.

"And we _won_ trust me,” Gloin muttered, which made his two friends smirk. “Tall bastards can’t fight.”

"You are all aware, of course, that these people are our allies. Our friends. I meet with their king once a month. Men are our friends, and I believe I have made it pretty clear that they should remain so. What sort of message do you think it gives when three lords, three heroes of Erebor, go and have tavern brawls with Men in Dale?"

"Shows we’re not going to let them insult our fri… our king’s memory, is what it does!" Gloin claimed, and it was clear he intended to be their spokeperson in this business.

Dain sighed. He should have known that somehow, this would be about Thorin. It always was.

"What did they say about my cousin, then? Did they call him stubborn, maybe? With all the respect due to the dead, he _was_.”

"They called him mad!" Dwalin roared, loud enough to startle the king.

"They said he was greedy and pushing toward war for the love of gold!" Ori squeaked furiously.

They were shouting together, clearly outraged by what had lead to their little fight, until Gloin managed to calm them down. He turned to Dain then, and while he was slightly more contained than his friends, he was no less angry.

"We were having a drink after meeting with one of Bard’s people to negotiate taking in some of their children to train them as scribes. Was Balin should have come, but his leg gave him trouble so I took these two instead. We were doing fine. We were polite. Met a couple elves, and we didn’t attack them," Gloin said as if that were particularly noteworthy. Coming from him, it probably was. "Then, we went to that tavern. Nice place. Decent owner. We were relaxing and then, that man at the table next to ours looks at us and asks us what it felt like to follow a mad king into battle!"

Dain cringed. He could picture it too easily. He could see the man’s cocky, superior smirk, and he could feel Dwalin’s pain and anger because the old, broken warrior still cried sometimes at hearing about his cousins… and Gloin who, for all his complaining, was loyal and faithful to the death if you deserved it… and little Ori… tiny, quiet little child who had followed his king accross the world…

"You should have kept your temper in check," Dain said, though his blood too boiled at the insult. "We cannot risk our alliance to Dale for the sake of one Man who cannot keep his mouth shut."

"We didn’t answer," Ori protested. "Not until they started the song."

"The song?"

The three dwarves nodded together, Dwalin shaking from anger, Ori clenching his fists and Gloin standing proud.

"They made a song," the fire haired dwarf claimed. "Not six month Thorin has been dead, and they made a song! ‘Mad Thorin would fuck his gold’, it goes, and that’s not the worst part of it."

"Mad Thorin would fuck his gold," Ori sang softly, "but the gold won’t let it. Round and round goes the mad king, round and round after his gold, mad Thorin would fuck his gold, but he found known and fucked an orc, but the orc won’t let it, put a spear through the king’s arse, and was Mad Thorin who got it good." The boy grimaced. "That shit doesn’t even _rhyme_ , but the whole tavern sang it together!”

All three dwarves looked at their king, and Dain stared back. He had known that Thorin was not very popular among the people they had to call their allies, but for it to be so bad… there was a difference between acceptable dislike and that level of hatred toward a _hero_.

"Do we have songs about Thorin?" Dain asked, and the question took the others by surprise.

"Not that sort of song, we certainly don’t!" Gloin replied.

"I rather hope not. But do we have songs about brave king Thorin, standing against an army? Ballads about thirteen friends fighting for their people? Is anyone in Erebor singing about who Thorin really was?"

Silence fell as the three dwarves tried to recall if they had heard anything of the sort. Then…

"My brother Nori is good at making up songs," Ori said quietly. "He hasn’t sung much since the battle, but to defend Thorin one last time, I think he would. And if we asked Bofur to sing his songs… people like Bofur, he’s good fun."

"We’ll need history books too," Dwalin grunted. "History books and songs, that matters more than the truth."

"We’re going to need scribes for that," Gloin said. "You’re going to have to do some work, Ori, and get some help… there’s got to be people in the mountain who want to write about Thorin."

Dain listened to them, and smiled. This was much better than fighting men in taverns, and Dain understood better why his cousin had chosen these particular dwarves to follow him.

And once young humans would come to learn the work of scribe, they could be made to read the histories, even to copy them to improve their writing skills… and if the songs caught up, as they might indeed because dwarves never resisted a good song, the young humans would go home singing of a dwarf who did not give in to their parents. It might change things, and then again, it might not.

But they would honour the fallen king’s memory, and make sure that in Erebor at least, the truth about him would be known.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ori mourns the princes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was not originally meant to go with the first ficlet, but it fits well enough with it I think?

_It’s odd to be still standing up at the end of the day_ _,_ Ori’s father had once told him, _when so many other good people will never rise again. It makes you wonder why you’re not dead, and you ask yourself if you didn’t steal a better person’s chance to survive._

A strange thing to say, and one Ori had never really understood. Winning must have been wonderful, he had always thought, and surviving must have been exhilarating.

Now, though, standing in front of the grave of two dwarves who had become his best friends, and the grave of another he would have followed into Mordor if need be, Ori thought he could understand his father. He had come unharmed out of the battle. But Fili and Kili, who had been braver, stronger, faster than him, had died, and Ori wondered if he had stolen their luck to survive.

“Then I’ll have to make sure to live enough for the two of us,” he whispered, brushing the stone of their grave with his fingers. “If I live because you died, life should feel even more precious, shouldn’t it? Even if I miss you… even if I’ll never see you smile again, never hear you laugh again, life is still precious, isn’t it? I should be happy that I’m alive, even if you’re not…”

He choked on that last word, tears coming to his eyes. He did not try to stop them. He had cried a lot in the past few days, but others in the company were trying not to. So Ori cried for them. He cried Oin’s tears and Nori’s. He cried Dwalin’s tears, because the old warrior had not woken up yet but oh, he would have cried otherwise, cried and cried for the king he had so loved, for the boys that had thought of him as another uncle, and whom he had held in his arms as babies.

Ori cried Dwalin’s tears, and he cried his own, because he too had loved the princes, and he missed them as a caged bird missed flying: It wouldn’t kill him to live without them, but it barely deserved to be called a life.

“I’ll make you proud,” he told the cold stone. “And when I am old, so very old that no other dwarf ever lived so old, when I have conquered anything and seen great adventures, when I have been so happy, I will meet you again, and you won’t be so angry I stole your luck. I will have a full, good life, and I will have so many things to tell you when we meet again.”

Ori forced himself to smile through his tears, and he kissed the heavy stone above his friends’ corpses.

One day, he would meet them again indeed. But he was young yet, not even a hundred. He had another two hundred years to live, maybe _more_ , and he would use them well before he was sent back to the stone.


End file.
